Today’s Must ReadWhile the State Department has frequently covered for Blackwater, particularly over the Nisour Square incident, the military has tended to be more candid. “It may be worse than Abu Ghraib,” a senior officer said last week, at a time when diplomats were, at most, conceding “there’s an issue here” and urging calm in the aftermath of the shooting. That shouldn’t be surprising: after all, it’s the 160,000 troops in Iraq who suffer by association with reckless contractors.
Now, after Blackwater got off lightly at a Congressional hearing Tuesday — in which Nisour Square was not explored — the military is pressing the point harder. U.S. military reports from the scene at Nisour Square, separate from the initial Blackwater-penned “first blush” inquiry, portray Blackwater guards as out of control and trigger-happy, firing on Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces almost indiscriminately. “It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong,” a U.S. military official tells The Washington Post.
The most significant new detail added by the U.S. military account about the chaos at Nisour Square on September 16: Contrary to Blackwater’s frequently-repeated account, no Iraqi civilian or policeman fired upon its guards. The small-arms fire was, in other words, all coming from the contractors.
Unfortunately, there’s no further elaboration in the Post piece. But let’s review. Blackwater initially said that its convoy came under complex attack on September 16, first from an IED and then from small-arms fire at the Square. Then the Iraqi Interior Ministry, relying on videotape from a nearby police command center, found the explosion occurred far from the attack site, and that the proximate cause of the violence was a car’s failure to heed a traffic instruction to halt. It further came out that the car failed to stop because Blackwater guards had killed its driver as part of its “escalation of force” rules of engagement, causing the car to lurch forward.
That picture doesn’t reflect well on Blackwater, but if its guards were under fire from Iraqi gunmen, overzealous force would be, at least, understandable. If Blackwater wasn’t fired upon, though, the firm has no such excuse. It’s worth remembering that Iraqi eyewitnesses have consistently said Blackwater was the only one firing: “Not a single bullet. They were the only ones shooting,” a traffic cop told the Post. If one Blackwater convoy was returning fire, then, that fire was coming from the other convoy at the opposite entrance to the square. By contrast, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince told the House oversight committee in his prepared written statement that “Some of those firing on this Blackwater team appeared to be wearing Iraqi National Police uniforms, or portions of such uniforms. As the withdrawal occurred, the Blackwater vehicles remained under fire from such personnel.”
Now the credibility of Prince’s account is undercut by the U.S. military, which has no interest in falsely accusing Blackwater. After all, if it portrays Blackwater as a band of psychotics, its soldiers will pay the price from outraged Iraqis. A joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation into Nisour Square may be continuing. But Prince needs it to unearth a mountain of exculpatory evidence — and to explain why his testimony, delivered under oath, directly contradicts the military reporting from the scene.
